Wider podium for quartet
Great Britain finished sixth in the 4-man Bobsleigh at the World Championships on Sunday as Brad Hall, Leon Greenwood, Taylor Lawrence and Greg Cackett made the wider podium in Winterberg.
The GB1 crew maintained their overnight position in the final two runs but were unable to move into the top three and secure a second successive medal at the showpiece event of the season after their stunning silver in St Moritz 13 months ago.
Hall and co clocked a combined time of 3 minutes 35.7 seconds to finish 0.46 seconds clear of the Italian team in seventh and just 0.02 seconds shy of Austria’s Marcus Treichl in fifth.
Hall, Lawrence, Cackett and Arran Gulliver won the country’s first World Championship 4-man medal for 84 years when they took that silver in Switzerland last season but they always faced an uphill task to medal again after injuries meant they were given a tough start draw for the first of the two days of competition.
With Hall having had back surgery in the autumn; Cackett suffering a severe hamstring tear in the summer; and Greenwood earning his spot after Gulliver missed much of the season with groin and hamstring problems, the team have had limited ice time this term and therefore started 17th of 22 sleds on Saturday’s first day of competition.
They sat eighth after the first run and went fourth fastest in Run 2, fifth fastest in Run 3 and sixth quickest in Run 4. They were the fifth fastest starters in Runs 1 and 2 and sixth quickest in Runs 3 and 4.
Fellow Brits Adam Baird, Jens Hullah, Austin Millward and Calum Dixon finished 18th on their World Championship debuts, making the top 20 after three heats to secure a fourth and final run.
Pilot Baird only made his World Cup bow in January, while neither Hullah nor Dixon had represented GB prior to this season and Milward had never raced at any level before this weekend.
They registered a time of 3 minutes 38.40 seconds, holding their Day 1 position after dropping a spot in Run 3 but picking it up again in Run 4.
Baird and his crew finished just two hundredths shy of the second Austrian team in 17th and only four hundredths from the Dutch team in 16th.
There is one more top-tier race this season, with the final World Cup competition scheduled for March 21-23 in Lake Placid, USA.
Before that, Adele Nicoll and Kya Placide finished 11th in the Women’s Bobsleigh in their first World Championships on Saturday afternoon.
The Welsh pair clocked a combined time of 3:46.58 over the fourrun race in Winterberg, Germany.
Nicoll and Placide sat seventh overnight after an outstanding first day’s competition but they dropped four spots in the final run as sleds 7-11 were separated by just a few hundredths of a second after Run 3.
Maintaining their position from the first day would have seen them register the country’s best women’s result since Paula Walker and Gillian Cooke finished in the same spot in Lake Placid in 2012 but placing in the top half of a 24-strong field is a remarkable achievement considering the pair’s inexperience.
Nicoll, who only switched from push athlete to pilot after the Beijing Olympics, made her World Cup debut as a driver in this discipline as recently as late January and had just two top-tier appearances to her name before stepping on the start line yesterday.
Placide is even newer to the GB set up after earning selection this summer but the 19-year-old helped Nicoll to the ninth fastest starts in every heat as she showed her potential on the world stage.